Mohammed Merah, the suspect in the killing of seven people outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, fits the pattern of an al-Qaeda intelligence asset. According to the BBC, he was on the radar of French authorities because of visits he made to Afghanistan and the “militant stronghold” of Waziristan in Pakistan.

More specifically, Merah was handled by France’s DCRI intelligence service “for years,” according to Claude Guéant, the interior minister.

Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin, was arrested on December 19, 2007, and was sentenced to three years in jail for planting bombs in the southern province of Kandahar in Afghanistan.

“The DCHC will be responsible for developing an ‘offensive counterintelligence operations’… capability for the Department of Defense, which may entail efforts to penetrate, deceive and disable foreign intelligence activities directed against U.S. forces,”Secrecy News reported in 2008 after the government announced the creation of DCHC.

Although virtually ignored by the corporate media, it is an established fact that the CIA and Pakistani intelligence created what is now known as al-Qaeda out of the remnants of the Afghan mujahideen following the CIA’s covert three billion dollar war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

It was the so-called Safari Club – organized under the CIA and with the participation of intelligence agencies in France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and (under the Shah) Iran – that ramped up the largely contrived threat of international terrorism prior to and during the CIA’s manufactured war in Afghanistan (see Peter Dale Scott, Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia).

Intelligence agencies have specialized in the covert – and not so covert – creation of terrorists which are then used to provide a cynical raison d’être for launching military intervention around the world and also providing a pretext to build and expand a domestic surveillance police state.

A textbook example of this process is the Christmas Day, 2009, underwear bomber fiasco – subsequently exposed as a false flag event – that was exploited to push for installing dangerous radiation-emitting naked body porno scanners at U.S. airports.

The fact Mohammed Merah was in the custody of the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan – and his supposed jail break at the Sarposa Prison was reportedly orchestrated by the Taliban (also cretaed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI) – certainly raises questions about the attack in France, where a national election will soon be held.

The Telegraph reports that the attacks of the supposedly al-Qaeda connected Merah will play into the election bid of National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, who is unlikely to ever become the president of France.

“In the short term it is likely that President Nicolas Sarkozy will benefit. Very quickly he took charge. He rushed to the scene. He suspended his campaign. He spoke as the president of the republic,” writes Gavin Hewitt for the BBC.